🏆 Award-Winning Project
Neural-Integrated ExoGlove
Designing assistive wearable technology through participatory research with patients — from zero to award-winning prototype in one academic year.
Role
Founder, Lead UX Researcher & Designer
Domain
Assistive Tech / Medical Device Design
Institution
UC Berkeley, Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership— Honors Health + Tech Fellow
🏆 Award
College of Engineering Showcase — All-Around Stand Out
The Challenge
Hand-mobility impairment affects millions — and most assistive devices are designed without them.
Conditions like stroke, cerebral palsy, spinal cord injury, and ALS can leave people with limited or no hand function. Existing exoskeletal gloves on the market were bulky, expensive, and most critically: designed by engineers without substantive input from the people who would actually wear them.
At UC Berkeley's Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership, our team set out to change that. The goal was to build a neural-integrated exoskeletal glove — one that could interpret brain signals and create grip — designed from the ground up with patients as co-designers, not just test subjects.
The core design question
How do you design an assistive device that genuinely fits into someone's life when the medical, social, and emotional context of disability is so deeply personal?
My Role
Bridging the gap between patients, engineers, and clinicians.
I served as the lead UX researcher and designer on a cross-disciplinary team at the Fung Institute. My job was to ensure that every engineering decision was grounded in real human experience — not assumptions about what patients need.
This meant conducting hands-on participatory research with people living with hand-mobility impairments, translating their lived experience into design requirements, and facilitating collaboration across a team of mechanical engineers, neuroscientists, and clinicians.
Process
Participatory design, from first interview to final prototype.
1. Participatory Research with Patients
Conducted in-depth qualitative interviews and observation sessions with individuals living with hand-mobility impairments. Rather than asking what they couldn't do, I focused on what mattered most to them — making coffee, holding a pen, shaking someone's hand. These sessions shaped every design decision that followed.
2. Needs Synthesis & Design Requirements
Synthesized interview findings into a structured set of human-centered design requirements: the device needed to be wearable in public without stigma, operable with one hand during donning, and adaptive to varying grip strengths. These requirements were handed directly to the engineering team as constraints — not suggestions.
3. Co-Design & Iterative Prototyping
Facilitated co-design workshops where patients evaluated form factors, materials, and interaction models directly. We went through multiple low-fidelity prototypes — foam, cardboard, 3D-printed shells — gathering feedback before committing to a final form. Patients had veto power over any design direction that felt dehumanizing or impractical.
4. Cross-Disciplinary Team Facilitation
Served as the bridge between patients, engineers, neuroscientists, and clinical advisors. Translated clinical terminology into plain language for the team and patient priorities into engineering specs. Ran weekly alignment sessions to prevent the project from drifting toward what was technically interesting rather than what was genuinely useful.
5. Final Prototype & Showcase
The final prototype integrated surface EMG sensors to detect residual muscle activity and translate it into assisted grip force — allowing users with limited voluntary control to perform everyday tasks. The device was demonstrated live at the UC Berkeley College of Engineering Showcase before faculty, industry judges, and the broader engineering community.
Key Insight
"The most important design tool is never software. It’s listening without an agenda."
— Cyrus Pilling, reflecting on the ExoGlove process
The biggest lesson from this project was that participatory design is not a research method — it's a power structure. Most assistive tech is designed for patients, not with them. The moment we handed patients the ability to reject a design direction entirely, the project got sharper, more honest, and ultimately more useful.
This experience became the foundation of how I approach all UX work: start with the people, not the technology. Every IBM enterprise project, every makerspace mentorship session since has been shaped by what I learned in those interviews.
Outcomes
From research to recognition.
🏆 All-Around Stand Out
Won the top award at the UC Berkeley College of Engineering Annual Showcase — selected from all engineering disciplines by a panel of faculty and industry judges.
🧠 Patient-Validated Design
Every major design decision was validated by people living with hand-mobility impairments — a rarity in the assistive tech space at the time of the project.
⚙️ Functional Neural Integration
Delivered a working prototype using surface EMG to detect muscle signals, translating residual voluntary movement into assisted grip — demonstrated live at the showcase.
📐 Reusable Design Framework
The participatory research methodology developed for this project has informed how I approach every subsequent UX project — from enterprise AI tools to maker education.
Methods & Skills
What this project required
This was not a conventional UX project. It demanded a combination of clinical empathy, engineering translation, and organizational facilitation that I hadn't needed to deploy at once before.
Participatory Design
Qualitative Research
Medical Device UX
EEG / Neurotechnology
Prototyping
3D Printing
Cross-Disciplinary Facilitation
Human-Centered Design
Accessibility
Workshop Skills